


Many Times

by embolalia



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Screaming in the desert, So much heartbreak for Furiosa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-31
Updated: 2015-05-31
Packaged: 2018-04-02 04:43:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4046428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/embolalia/pseuds/embolalia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Have you done this before? Max asked her. And she answered him: many times.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Many Times

Understanding tore its way out of her throat with a scream. It was too much to think about right then, and she lost herself in reunions and planning and goodbyes – and then in the fight and the pain that followed. 

If there’s any mercy in the universe it’s that she doesn’t have a moment to stop and think, calm and alone, until she’s wandering the gardens on top of the Citadel a handful of days after they’ve claimed it for their own. Furiosa doesn’t scream this time, but she does sink down against the craggy face of a boulder, tucking her face into her shoulder as she weeps.

 _Have you done this before?_ Max asked her. And she answered him: _many times._

The first time she was ten or so, still new to the Citadel. She’d been living with the war pups since Miss Giddy announced her arm disqualified her from ever being a wife and marched Furiosa off to where the boys piled upon each other and wrestled for the joy of helping to crank the lift up and down. She hung back from their games and waited and watched, and one night she made a mad break for the desert. A patrol caught her before she’d left the circle of dwellings where the Wretched crouched below the Citadel. The punishment couldn’t compare to her disappointment.

At sixteen, part of a raiding party on Gas Town during some trading dispute, Furiosa saw her opportunity again. She twisted her motorcycle east, headed up the dunes. The reality as she reached the top and stared out was painful: she had only enough water and guzzoline to reach the horizon, and the Green Place was much further than that. One of the others pulled his bike up alongside her, turning to her in question. “Thought I saw a Spiker,” she muttered. They returned to the pack.

Furiosa outlived that generation of pups by the time she was twenty, and by then she was the best driver or black thumb short of the imperators. Her wheel entitled her to drive any vehicle she chose except the war rig. It was in those years that she began to venture out, claiming any opportunity for a scouting mission and running east whenever she could. She negotiated with the gangs who controlled the passes through the mountains and tried dozens of different routes.

All of them took her eventually to the slick, silty mudflats that stymied the wheels of every bike or car she tried. And yet the sight of them stirred her every time, because surely on the other side of this plain was her home and her family. What she needed was a War Rig to get across without getting stuck or running out of supplies.

Her ambition had always been survival, but now she had a concrete goal: she had to drive a War Rig. For four years Furiosa halted her excursions, followed every order. She stood guard over Immortan Joe with the other Imperators and waited outside his door while Splendid whimpered or Capable screamed. Miss Giddy glared at her ferociously from the door to the Vault. At night Furiosa retreated to the rooms she’d never left and the War Pups crowded around her in awe and desperate affection, torn from their mothers’ arms even younger than she had been. She turned away from them, now. Many of them would fall in the battle to come.

Only once after she became the most senior Imperator driver and the only one who knew the kill switches for her Rig did Furiosa go off alone into the desert. She left at night like the first time, but with a crisp nod to the War Boy at the gate that she was on an errand for the Immortan Joe and to keep this to himself. She took a bike no one would miss, made deals for safe passage at any of the passes she might reach in the rig, and then continued further until her wheels were splattering mud in every direction.  The Many Mothers had believed in prayer, or some of them had. Furiosa believed in nothing but the Green Place. She gazed out at the unending gray with its flights of crows and tried not to tremble with the knowledge that soon she might cross it and find home.

Furiosa didn’t exactly tell Miss Giddy what she was planning, but she said enough, and Splendid overheard. Within an hour, the wives were coming with her. It meant the pursuit would be heavier and there would certainly be a battle, but Furiosa couldn’t leave them here. Splendid and two of her sisters were pregnant; Cheedo was curled up in the corner, still new to the Citadel and not yet sent to the Immortan’s chambers. Furiosa knew exactly what was coming for all of them if she left them behind. The plan would take far more luck than she could count on, but she nodded. All of them deserved to die free.

She felt genuine relief when they reached the mud. None of the Citadel’s other vehicles were equipped to follow them here, and only a few from Gas Town or the Bullet Farm might manage it. The plains, even the crows, were almost familiar by now.

 _I can’t wait for them to see it._ Sometimes the words echo in her dreams.

Max said something about hope, about how it can make you insane. How it had made him insane, she understood. If they hadn’t come back to the Citadel she might have gone mad, too.

Dropping to her knees in the desert felt like insanity, the agonizing knowledge tearing itself loose from her body the only way it knew how. She had reached what remained of the Green Place many times and never known. She would never see it as she remembered it again. It was too much to bear.

She supposes, as tears streak down her cheeks, that she owes Max something for urging them to come back here. With the sweet smell of green around her, the pain doesn’t dwell as deep. A hundred days on the plains of silence might have stolen her mind, twisted her wheel until she was as alone as she felt, had always felt, in the places that were not home.

But the mud. The mud never leaves her for long.

Furiosa has dried her cheeks by the time the Dag and Honora, one of the remaining Vuvalini, find her. She still hasn't rebuilt her prosthetic arm and lets the Dag take her good hand to pull her to her feet.

“The Keeper of the Seeds had started an apple seedling,” the Dag says, eyes shining. “It’s taking root. They say apples are delicious.”

Furiosa manages a nod. “They were. I ate one as a child.”

Honora reaches up to stroke Furiosa’s cheek. “There will be orchards again.”

She looks away, across the plateau and out into the distance where the land around the Citadel promises to grow. It will never be the Green Place of her childhood, but the Dag will soon be round with her baby. There will be many mothers.

In the desert, everything is pain. Furiosa is not the only one with screaming in her mind. Someday she'll find her home again.

 


End file.
